Did a Robot Write This?

You can’t avoid AI (artificial intelligence) today. Don’t believe me? Look at your phone–there’s Siri, who uses voice recognition to find you anything on the web. Go to the movies and see Ex Machina and Her, just to name two robots in popular culture. Turn on the TV; look, there’s IBM Watson winning Jeopardy, and Data waxing logical on reruns of Star Trek. Get in the car—hey, it’s self-driving!

All this activity means northwest companies like Microsoft and Amazon are in a race for AI talent; with Paul Allen’s AI research institute competing for AI engineers as well. Venture capitalist Marc Andreesen has been quoted saying, “AI is eating the world”, and we agree, having been served up a healthy portion here at GreenRubino.

We’ve been working behind the scenes with many of the big players in AI in a variety of ways to help them articulate their stories.This includes the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, IBM Watson Health, Meta and Microsoft Research. While these organizations have different audiences and challenges, they all face a central issue: AI makes their products possible but the technology is too complex to discuss how it does it. Storytelling about AI has to be more about the benefits and less about what’s under the hood. User stories, analogies, and linking AI to larger societal trends are part of the magic of getting the market to understand why they care about AI, both as an enabler and as a differentiator.

By the way, I ran this blog through IBM Watson’s tone analyzer, and apparently, its tone is 60% angry, and 56% disgusted, sorry. But at least it’s written by a 100% human being.